In many machines, the conveying of a medium is an important task that is necessary to maintain the proper functioning and operation of the machine. For example, a cooling medium and/or a lubricant often must be transported to one or more locations within the machine. In the case of lubricants, such locations are often bearings, such as roller bearings or slide bearings, or other regions of the machine, in which individual machine elements move relative to each other. The lubricant reduces friction between the relatively-moving machine elements and/or cools the machine elements.
However, it is often necessary to precisely tune the individual components of such a lubricating system relative to each other, in order to ensure as much as possible that a sufficient amount of the lubricant is present at or near the machine elements in need of lubrication under all operating conditions. Thus, it is usually necessary to tune or adjust the system for supplying fresh lubricant to the machine element and the system for discharging or exhausting used lubricant to ensure that equal amounts of lubricant are being supplied to and discharged from the area in need of lubrication, even though it may be very costly to do so, in order to prevent an under- or oversupply of the lubricant.
In particular, in the case of mechanical components that move relative to each other, in which lubrication is provided for reducing wear, a tuning of the lubricant supply and the accompanying used lubricant discharge is usually required.
DE 44 42 188 C1 and DE 20 2007 005 273 U1 (and its counterpart US 2010/0322543 A1) describe lubricant suction pumps, with which used lubricant is suctioned away from the machine elements in need of lubrication in a specific manner. However, in such systems, the danger of insufficient lubrication exists that can lead, in turn, to increased wear and thus to an increased deterioration and a reduced service life of the particular machine elements as well as the machine as a whole.
Often the structure and the upkeep of such a system requires a construction and manufacturing with especially low tolerances as well as a costly tuning during the assembly and a costly upkeep during the subsequent operation.